Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Trump to FBI Director Comey: "You're Fired!"

By Douglas V. Gibbs
AuthorSpeakerInstructorRadio Host

The first thing that came to mind when I heard John and Ken on KFI Los Angeles on my car radio announce that President Donald J. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey was, "What took so long?"

I was travelling between my early Tuesday meeting and radio session with the Banning-Beaumont-Cherry Valley Tea Party Patriots and Corona's AllStar Collision where I teach a Constitution Class on Tuesday Nights, when I heard the news.  Comey, a Bush appointee for Deputy Attorney General, turned out to be hardly a good director, and in fact is guilty of treason by refusing to recommend pressing charges against Hillary Clinton while admitting there was a huge pile of evidence stacked against her regarding her use of emails.  He then later refused to pursue evidence that Obama's administration conducted illegal surveillance on, then, Candidate Donald Trump.  He participated in covering up crime after crime by the Democrats, and then has played into their narrative regarding Russia influencing the election when basic common sense tells us that there is no way Putin would desire a Trump presidency over Hillary Clinton.

Comey's false testimony in the latest round of questioning, this time over the alleged tampering by Russia in the election (which tied into Weiner's computer), is what finally got him fired.

Let that sink in. False testimony. If he was capable of false testimony now, God knows how many times his testimony has been false in the past. The Democrats would rather we not go down that rabbit hole, though.

Trump's decision to fire Comey was based on the recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Comey received notice of his firing in writing, carrying in it also an assurance that the firing had nothing to do with any ongoing probes involving Trump personally.

Trump's letter stated, "While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau."

John Podesta, who served as Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman in 2016, snarked on Twitter that Trump was in fact under an FBI microscope.

The false testimony was as follows:
In his sworn testimony, Comey told senators that Huma Abedin, a former top Hillary Clinton aide and Weiner's estranged wife, made "a regular practice" of forwarding "hundreds and thousands" of emails to her husband Anthony Weiner, "some of which contain classified information."

The Justice Department sent the Judiciary Committee a letter after Comey's testimony acknowledging that Comey's statement was inaccurate.
Gregory A. Brower, the FBI's assistant director in the Office of Congressional Affairs, wrote to the Judiciary Committee to "clarify" Comey's testimony about Abedin's role in allowing classified material to find its way to her husband's computer.

Most of the "hundreds and thousands" of emails, Brower wrote, were there as a result of backups of other devices – and not manually sent by Abedin.

Only "two e-mail chains containing classified information were manually forwarded to Mr. Weiner's account," he wrote.

Ten additional chains contained classified material – all part of device backups – and "all twelve" had already been reviewed by the FBI.

When he was Attorney General, James Comey became a friend of the Democrats when he, in 2004, refused to sign a reauthorization of warrantless eavesdropping while Attorney General John Ashcroft was hospitalized.

Comey had been appointed deputy attorney general by President George W. Bush, having served as a U.S. attorney in New York under Rudy Giuliani in New York. With Ashcroft incapacitated, Bush administration officials wanted Ahscroft, and then Comey, to sign off on an extension of the authority, with just hours to go before an N.S.A. program expired. Comey refused.

Comey's refusal to comply with Bush's demands made him a friend of the Democrats, and was the inspiration needed to land him as head of the FBI in 2013 under Barack Obama's watch.

Comey was not so much a Democrat Party darling after his announcement right before the election that the investigation against Hillary Clinton was going to be renewed, since the bureau had discovered new emails that may be connected to the investigation on Anthony Weiner's laptop.

Hillary Clinton blames that announcement, and the one two days before the election that said the investigation hadn't turned up anything to alter the decision not to prosecute, on her electoral loss last November.

It couldn't possibly be because she was an arrogant candidate that did not campaign as she should have, or that every decision her campaign team made were bad decisions, or that she was a bad candidate in the first place.

At least she's not blaming an anti-Muslim video for her loss.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

No comments: